Ben Wheatley Wants to Make You Feel Responsible for Murder in Sightseers

Tina (Alice Lowe) in Sightseers. Photo courtesy Ben Wheatley.

A few years ago, Ben Wheatley helped his friend get hit by a car. It turned out to be an excellent career move.

Wheatley, 41, is the British filmmaker behind the dark-hearted, sneakily funny road-trip comedy Sightseers, which opens this weekend. Executive produced by Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz creator Edgar Wright, Sightseers follows a seemingly milquetoast suburban couple (played by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram) whose tourist-trapped journey through the English countryside devolves into a gory — and, for the viewer, discomfortingly plausible — murder spree. Sightseers is one part Badlands and one part Bad Taste, and based on the film’s overseas response and stateside critical momentum, it seems primed to become Wheatley’s breakthrough hit.

But even if you’ve never heard Wheatley’s name, there’s a good chance you’ve seen his work. He’s been working online since the early 2000s, when he started creating animated GIFs, jokey Photoshop images, and Flash films, many of which he posted to the British digital-hijinks hub B3TA.com. “It was like doing stand-up comedy to the world,” Wheatley said. “You kept honing and honing [your work]. I felt that, when I put my hands on my keyboard, I was feeling the cultural pulse of the internet — making stuff, feeling the feedback, and changing it to find an audience.”

People complain: ‘Oh, that’s making me feel upset.’ Well, someone’s died. If you’re getting entertainment out of that, and you think that’s acceptable — well, it’s not. You have to be reminded of what these characters are… You’re responsible for the murders, in a way.

— Ben Wheatley

Wheatley was also making comedy shorts, though he initially had little luck finding support: “We’d take them to pubs and cinema clubs and show them to forty people,” he said, “and then they’d go in a drawer and never be seen again. That had gotten kind of depressing.” But by the time Wheatley and his friend Rob Hill made the nine-second clip “Cunning Stunt” — in which a cocky Hill appears to leap over one moving car, only to be clobbered by another — online video had become a reality.

Made in just a few hours, and employing some now-rudimentary editing tricks, the video garnered nearly 15 million views on Wheatley’s site, inspired an homage on Robot Chicken, and nabbed the attention of ad execs and television producers, who soon hired Wheatley for a string of commercials and sketches. “The internet made the difference between me working in media, or not,” Wheatley said.

He eventually transitioned into low-budget films, making his debut with 2009’s Down Terrace, about a working-class crime family in decline. Unlike most American crime films, where even sad-sack gangsters are granted a hint of glamor, the squabbling mom-and-pop gangsters in Down Terrace were hopelessly exhausted, perennially peeved and in love with an idealized past that likely never existed.

Wheatley’s follow-up, 2011’s Kill List, follows two hitmen who stumble upon a Wicker Man-like death cult. Like Sightseers, both films examine the mundane rhythms and oft-trifling concerns of suburbia without ever mocking its denizens. Despite their deviousness, Wheatley’s remorseless assassins and body-burying oafs are relatable — maybe even too relatable — workaday types. “You have to like the people you’re talking about,” said Wheatley. “Even if they’re bastards.”

In Sightseers, Wheatley may have found his most likeable bastards yet. The lovers-on-the-run genre is filled with tales of romance-spurred revenge, from The Honeymoon Killers to True Romance. But Wheatley’s couple, Chris and Tina, don’t fit the movies’ usual criminal profile: They’re slightly awkward, close to middle-age, and seem more interested in banal small-town museums than by, say, the thrill of the kill.

They’re so normal, in fact, that even when they start upping the films’ body count, they remain oddly sympathetic — which is why Wheatley chose to include a handful of brief (but nonetheless nauseating) gore-filled scenes. “People complain: ‘Oh, that’s making me feel upset.'” Wheatley said. “Well, someone’s died. If you’re getting entertainment out of that, and you think that’s acceptable — well, it’s not. You have to be reminded of what these characters are, and be reminded that you’re along for the ride. You’re responsible for the murders, in a way.”

As he did with Down Terrace and Kill List, Wheatley kept the budget small on Sightseers, filming it for a little under $2 million. His next feature to be released, a black-and-white, English Civil War-set oddity called A Field in England — which he describes as “a period drama crossed with a Roger Corman movie” — was made for even less, and it’ll be released in the U.K. in July using a risky new distribution strategy that will launch it in theaters, on DVD, on-demand, and free TV all on the same date (a U.S. release will follow).

The idea, Wheatley said, is partly to utilize platforms like Twitter, where a single film can dominate the conversation for days. “It might work, or it might open me up to criticism like, ‘Oh, they just dumped it,'” he said with a laugh. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive to give a movie away for free. But at the same time, if you’ve got a million people talking about it, that’s’ a pretty amazing bit of marketing. And if you’ve got big resources, you’ve got to use them.”

Despite the festival freakouts over Sightseers — which played at Cannes last year — and the occasional talks with Hollywood studios, Wheatley is determined to keep making movies in the U.K., where he lives with his wife, Sightseers editor and co-writer Amy Jump. But the next movie he’s working on will at least take place here in the states: Titled Freakshift, and budgeted between $15 and $20 million, it’s the story of a female police troupe that specializes in taking down monsters — “like Hill Street Blues meets Doom, the game,” Wheatley said.

Getting someone to fork over eight figures for a cop-on-creature shoot-‘em-up? That might be Wheatley’s most cunning stunt to date.